🎙Episode #032: Mike Yaghami (Facebook Brand and Marketing Lawyer)
👋🏻 Greetings! As we transition to a new academic year, I want to thank you for being a part of the How I Lawyer family this past year!
I also want to welcome our newest members of the profession including both law students just starting their legal journey and newly minted practicing attorneys getting started in that first legal job. Being a lawyer is not always easy but as the first 32 episodes of the podcast I hope show it can be a very rewarding profession.
I also hope the you’ll welcome some new folks to our group by sharing the podcast or writing a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts (forward this e-mail or click the link). Every share and comment helps!
And with that this week’s episode!
In this episode I speak with Mike Yaghmai who is a Director and Associate General Counsel at Facebook where he heads up the company's legal work related to the company's brand and marketing. In this capacity Mike and his team are responsible for clearance, prosecution, and enforcement of the company's brand portfolio as well as the legal elements of Facebook's marketing policies. Before working at Facebook for the past 8 years, Mike worked at eBay for almost seven years and before that he worked as an intellectual property associate at Willdman Harrolld and then Howrey LLP. Mike is a Bay Area native and graduate of San Jose State University. After college, he worked in the San Jose mayor's office before moving to Chicago to complete his law degree at the DePaul University School of Law.
In our conversation we discuss Mike's (largely unplanned) path to becoming a brand and marketing lawyer, what a brand and marketing lawyer does on a day-to-day basis (especially at a large company like Facebook), ways to stand out as part of an in-house legal team or as outside counsel servicing in-house legal teams, and techniques for transitioning into management roles where leadership skills become as important if not more important than legal skills.
See you next week,
Jonah